The makers of PolishLinux have made a nice preview of the state of KDE 4.1. "You don't always see this in the official changelogs but the KDE 4 development is progressing in an extraordinary speed." They also have a look at Digikam's KDE 4 port, including its nifty new timeline and Google maps integration.

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Not related directly to the article, but as we are talking about "polishing" KDE 4;):
On my setup, KDE3 and KDE4 have the same font settings (including antialiasing). However, while the KDE3 font rendering seems almost as good as on windows, KDE4's fonts look kind of fragile and frayed.
The screenshots in this article look definitely better than what I achieve with my KDE4 setup. What are the doing?
BTW, I'm using Tahoma and Vardana fonts, looking great both with WinXP and KDE3.

Something which striked me as odd about the kickoff menu is the "leave" menu. When you press something like "shutdown" or "restart" it pops up a menu which basicly asks you the same thing. thereby invalidating the choice you made before.

Another thing that might be nice would be to make the menu a little bit bigger by default so that you wouldn't need a scrollbar by default in the application part of the menu. ( scrollbars by default is really really bad. )

I realize that by the time kde 4.1 comes out i can resize it myself. so i suppose it isn't that much of a problem. but it would probably be nice to such things as defaults.

Another thing which boggled in my mind is that i find it really hard to see the difference between active and inactive windows. I found out that i always relied on the inactive window having a darker window then the active one. but with the new style it is basicly all white. I never really noticed how much i relied on it until now that it is gone. Any chance we could get just a little grey or something back for the inactive windows?

Right now i use a composite effect that basicly darkens the whole window. this works very nice as well, but unfortunately my laptop still has a kinda love/hate relationship with composite, so it would probably still be a nice thing to have.

Other then that i have been enjoying kde 4 quite a lot up to now and believe that kde will continue to be as stunning and impressive as ever.

Well, in opensuse KDE3 kickoff only shows a confirm dialog when you already choose the option in the kickoff menu. Someone from the opensuse team is working on kickoff in order to add all the features it already had in KDE3 so maybe it's on his to-do list.

"Other start menu alternative also have this pretty annoying behaviour"

The traditional start menu? It has only one menu entry for terminating the session, as in KDE 3 so it is not a problem that a window pops up asking whether you want to log out or shut down etc. The problem with Kickoff is that it has different menu entries for logout, shutdown etc., but it still asks one more time which do you want.

Any way to add "hibernate" in the kickoff menu ?
Now, the only way to start hibernation is to use the confirmation dialog, and use the secondary choices on the "shut down" button. I think that is way too much convoluted !
(and that almost never work, btw, although hibernation works when started manually with the s2disk command, or with guidance-power-manager)

KDE 4.1 looks great, but Applications Tab in kickoff is really, really bad. As a suggestion, Applications Tab could use something like "Amarok - Services" screenshot in review. On the left, we would have what is today Application's first level menu (Development, Education, Games, etc...) On the right side, launch icons. Most menus are two levels, so this design could fit very well. If some menu has more levels, this could be rendered as a tree view or indented lines on the right panel.